population control – China Digital Times (CDT)http://chinadigitaltimes.net
Covering China from CyberspaceFri, 09 Dec 2016 02:50:14 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.135652790China Digital Timeshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/wp-content/themes/cdt/images/feedlogo.pnghttp://chinadigitaltimes.net
India’s Chinese-Inspired “Two Child Norm”http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/06/indias-chinese-inspired-two-child-norm/
Thu, 13 Jun 2013 06:40:27 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=157609While China’s family planning policies have long been controversial, India’s “rights-based” approach has won international praise. At The Globe and Mail, however, Stephanie Nolan reports that the two systems are more similar than they may appear:

Beijing has been widely criticized for limiting families to only one child, but India has adopted many aspects of its policy. With 1.2 billion people and on course to overtake China as the planet’s most populous country in about a decade, India is taking steps many consider nearly as harsh – but cloaking them in the far more benign-sounding “two-child norm.”

[…] “We’re on the track to be just like China,” says Leena Uppal, an earnest activist who co-ordinates the National Coalition Against Two-Child Norm and Coercive Population Policies. “It’s entirely coercive – for the women, for the health worker, who will lose her job if she doesn’t bring in enough people. The whole focus is on closing off wombs, of making sure these women don’t have any more babies.”

[…] A.R. Nanda, who was once in charge of population policy for India and established its family planning department, says that not only is there a two-child policy, it was explicitly borrowed from China: “The idea of withholding benefits comes from China … ‘If China can do it.’” [Source]

Using surveys of 421 men and women in Beijing and testing their skills in economic games, researchers in Australia found those born after the 1979 policy were more pessimistic, nervous, less conscientious, less competitive and more risk averse. They also found them to be 23 percent less prone to choose an occupation that entails business risk, such as becoming a stockbroker, entrepreneur or private firm manager.

[…] Xin Meng, a co-author of the study who grew up in Beijing and left China in 1988, said she detects a different behavioral attitude among the only-child population compared with the previous generation. A 2011 incident where a two-year-old girl in southern China died after she was struck by two vans and ignored by 18 passersby caused a furor, with domestic media and Internet users criticizing Chinese society for a lack of morality.

“An incident like this is just unthinkable 20 years ago,” said Meng, a professor of economics at the Australian National University in Canberra. “If you’ve lived in the Chinese society for a long time, you can sense the difference as people become more individualistic.”

Professor Stuart West, from the University of Oxford, said the study was “very interesting”.

However, he cautioned against some of the conclusions that had been drawn.

He explained: “They are making very strong claims about differences in behaviour for people born before or after 1979, and they are inferring it is all to do with the introduction of the one child policy in that year.

“The problem is that is a potential explanation for that data – but there are almost an infinite number of other explanations of anything else that could have varied with time: variation of socio-economic environment, prosperity, nutrition, political environment – anything.”

Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas in Austin who studies these children, was puzzled that the study’s findings showed poor performance so consistently in virtually all measures. She said she would have expected a more mixed picture, and she hopes follow-up research is done.

[…] Careful studies done elsewhere that look for certain qualities in the only child find that “on average, they’re pretty much like everybody else,” she said.

The Chinese public was given a “trust score” of just 59.7 points out of a total of 100, according to the results of the CASS survey conducted among residents in seven cities, including Beijing, east China’s Shanghai, south China’s Guangzhou, central China’s Wuhan and southwest China’s Chongqing municipalities.

The survey showed that residents in China’s central and western regions tend to trust others more than their eastern counterparts.

[…] Yang Yiyin, one of the survey’s organizers, attributed the lack of trust to migration, China’s transformation from a planned economy to a market economy and declining “family culture.”

“People are more concerned about trust, especially in a transformative period when a new system of trust has not been established,” said Yang.

Although many other families live in the market above their stores, there is little sense of community. Just as in countless other hardscrabble suburbs across China, the residents are mostly migrants, drawn from all over the country.

They have little in common, beyond their shared desire to make money and improve their lot. And in the evenings, they close their shutters and retreat into their lonely stores.

“It is quite sad that we don’t really talk to each other because we all sell different things,” said a 50-year-old woman who would only name herself as Ms Hu, from a store selling abrasive pads a short stroll away from the Wang’s shop.

]]>149979Two-Child Policy?http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/11/two-child-policy/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/11/two-child-policy/#commentsThu, 29 Nov 2012 21:35:20 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=147368The former head of China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission suggests that the government is considering a relaxation of its one-child policy in the face of an ageing population. From Reuters:

Proposed changes would allow for urban couples to have a second child, even if one of the parents is themselves not an only child, the China Daily cited Zhang Weiqing, the former head of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, as saying on Wednesday.

Under current rules, urban couples are permitted a second child if both parents do not have siblings. Looser restrictions on rural couples means many have more than one child.

[…] President Hu Jintao dropped a standard reference to maintaining low birth rates in his work report to the ruling Communist Party’s five-yearly congress in early November, a break which some experts see as evidence of an imminent change to the one-child policy.

Demographers warn that the policy has led to a rapidly graying population that could hamper China’s economic competitiveness.

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/11/two-child-policy/feed/1147368Ministry of Truth: Two-Child Policyhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/11/ministry-of-truth/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/11/ministry-of-truth/#commentsMon, 19 Nov 2012 17:36:35 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=146844The following example of censorship instructions, issued to the media and/or Internet companies by various central (and sometimes local) government authorities, has been leaked and distributed online. Chinese journalists and bloggers often refer to those instructions as “Directives from the Ministry of Truth.” CDT has collected the selections we translate here from a variety of sources and has checked them against official Chinese media reports to confirm their implementation.

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. The original publication date is noted after the directives; the date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source.

The debate on China’s one-child policy has gone very public. A recent poll on Sina Weibo, a popular microblogging platform in China, asked the question, “Do you support allowing two children?” And it’s a 1984 Reagan-versus-Mondale style blowout. Out of 30,006 votes cast, 71.7% support abrogating the one-child policy, and only 28.3% want to keep it.

[…] When reading the survey results, however, the standard caveats apply: Those using Chinese social media tend to be younger, richer, and more educated than the Chinese population at large. Furthermore, only a small subset of that subset has chosen to participate in the poll. But the younger, richer, and digitally active Chinese who use social media regularly are many of the same people who will be making policy in the coming decades, and also making choices about whether or not to have children–and perhaps how many.

The most-read post on this debate appears to have come from Charles Xue, a well-known angel investor and web commenter. Xue describes how, “In the 50s…we blindly followed the Soviet Union, which had lost many people in the second world war and so encouraged births on a wide scale. They had few people and much land. The Dean of Peking University at that time, Ma Yinchu, felt that China had many people and not much [arable] land, with limited resources and primitive agricultural methods.” Xue describes how Ma thus suggested a limit of two children per household to keep birth rates normal.

[…] Now, thirty years later, “there are 20% fewer 20 year olds than there are 30 year olds!” The saddest part, according to Xue, is the shidu or “lost singles” families, Chinese slang for couples from the 50s and 60s who lived through great hardship, had their one child, then lost their one child to illness or accidents and are now forced to grow old with no one to care for them.

]]>145850Report: China Should End One-Child Policyhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/11/report-china-should-end-one-child-policy/
Thu, 01 Nov 2012 10:27:06 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=145674The Wall Street Journal reports that a think tank connected to China’s State Council has published a report recommending that the country should phase out its one-child policy, first by allowing two children per family by 2015 before doing away with the controversial policy altogether by 2020:

The report, produced by the China Development Research Foundation and highlighted by the state-run Xinhua news agency, points to China’s plummeting birth rate and numerous impending demographic imbalances in arguing that the one-child policy has outlived its usefulness, according to Xinhua.

China should have no need for birth planning after 2020, and should in fact begin encouraging families to have more children to avoid dangerously low fertility rates in the future, Xinhua quotes the report as saying.

Chinese family planning authorities credit the one-child policy with preventing around 400 million births, but concerns over the economic implications of China’s rapidly aging population, a widening gender imbalance and growing rights consciousness have led increasing numbers of academics and regular citizens to openly question the policy, which is sometimes enforced in brutal ways.

Cai Yong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said the report holds extra weight because the think tank is under the State Council, China’s Cabinet. He said he found it remarkable that state-backed demographers were willing to publicly propose such a detailed schedule and plan on how to get rid of China’s birth limits.

“That tells us at least that policy change is inevitable, it’s coming,” said Cai, who was not involved in the drafting of the report but knows many of the experts who were. Cai is a visiting scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. “It’s coming, but we cannot predict when exactly it will come.”

Adding to the uncertainty is a once-in-a-decade leadership transition that starts Nov. 8 and will see a new slate of top leaders installed by next spring. Cai said the transition could keep population reform on the back burner or changes might be rushed through to help burnish the reputations of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao on their way out.

“I think many people like to have these simple large numbers that are easy to recognize, and impressive, but unfortunately it’s baseless, it’s unscientific,” said Wang [Feng, director of Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy]. “The Chinese government likes to use this as a way to support, to justify the continued implementation of the one-child policy, which is long outdated.”

The scholars say that China’s biggest drop in fertility came from 1970-79 before the one-child policy was introduced and that the reductions since then have been largely due to economic and social reforms that make small families more attractive ….

“Thailand and China have had almost identical fertility trajectories since the mid 1980s,” he said. “Thailand does not have a one-child policy.”

A document on family planning in Guangdong’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), which will be issued soon, states that a low birth rate is to be maintained, said Zhang Feng, director of the provincial population and family planning commission, in Nanfang Daily on Sunday.

In July, Zhang said the provincial authorities had applied to the central government and were waiting for approval to lead the country in relaxing the family planning policy.

If the application was approved, couples in which either the husband or wife is an only child would be allowed to have a second child, he said in July.

According to Zhang then, the province had room to relax the one-child policy, which has been in place for more than three decades, because such a move would not lead to a fast increase in population, largely due to the increased costs of giving birth to and raising children.

The book, titled, “Footsteps of Growing Up” shows some almost pornographic images of a couple engaged in sexual activities. Some parents see such ‘blunt’ and ‘influential’ teaching methods as being a constructive step forward in educating China’s youngsters about the ‘facts of life’. However, alerting those so vulnerable, curious and easily-influenced about such intriguing and fascinating issues will surely only encourage them to experiment with, and even re-enact what they are discovering at school.

My four-year-old-son has already been asking me questions about how babies are made. This is a natural query many young children make as they start to become inquisitive about their own bodies and notice the differences between the genders. Adopting an honest attitude to such questions is important. However, we need not go into the same graphic detail that we find in the illustrations in China’s explicit new textbook, “Footsteps of Growing Up”. More important than how parents educate their children about sex is the fact that parents themselves should do the educating, not a teacher in a biology lesson. It should not be a school’s right or responsibility to inform children about issues of a sexual nature. That is the job of the parents.

Nowadays, though many college students are mature physically, they lack mental maturity, which leads to misunderstandings about sexual knowledge and sexual psychology.

Most of the college students adopt an inclusive and accepting attitude. Some 88 percent of students think one should be responsible for his or her sexual behaviors, while many students are not familiar with the consequences of pregnancy and the damages to a woman’s physical and mental health caused by artificial abortion.

During an activity in which free abortion services were offered to pregnant female college students launched by a hospital of another city, the hospital received about 50 phone consultations and did operations for 28 matched girls aged from 18 to 23. For most of the girls it was the first time, but other girls have had an abortion three or four times. Many college students do not understand that the abortion operation can cause permanent damage to uterus and infections in reproductive organs.

]]>124850Forecasting China and India’s Futureshttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/03/forecasting-china-and-indias-futures/
Wed, 02 Mar 2011 06:35:12 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=118480The Telegraph’s International Business Editor, Ambrose Evans-Pitchard, compares two different pictures of the world in 2050 and the two giants’ places in it:

The economies of China and India [according to Citigroup’s Willem Buiter] will together be four times as large as the United States, restoring the historic order of Asian dominance before Europe’s navies burst on the scene in the 16th Century. Panta Rei, says Dr Buiter: all is in flux; nothing will remain the same ….

Having rid themselves of calamitous nonsense – Maoism, the Hindu model, and other variants of central planning or autarky – and having at last achieved a “threshold level” of law and governance, nothing should stop them, or so goes the argument ….

HSBC’s report also sketches an era of unparalleled prosperity, yet the West does not sink into oblivion. China overtakes the US, but only just, and then loses momentum ….

Americans remain three times richer than the Chinese in 2050. The US economy still outstrips India by two-and-a-half times. This is an entirely different geo-strategic outcome.

Demography, naturally, is one of the main factors underlying these scenarios. At Reason, Shikha Dalmia contrasts China’s hukou restrictions and population controls with India’s more liberal policies, speculating on their likely consequences:

… India’s infrastructure issues, while difficult, are nothing compared to the problems China faces in assimilating its migrants. That’s because half-a-century of social engineering has decimated China’s civil society, something that will be much harder to rebuild than roads and power lines.

China’s one-child policy has undermined the safety net that the elderly normally rely on in traditional societies. This is one problem India does not have thanks to its democracy that put a decisive end to its brief flirtation with draconian population control through enforced sterilization in the 1970s. Hence, India’s tightly-knit extended family structure is largely intact, a gift of freedom to the country’s elderly.

Since China no longer has such a private safety net, its aging migrants will need a public one—just what hukou denies them. If China fails to extend hukou benefits, its large and disaffected underclass of deracinated, rural population might become a political tinderbox, ready to explode ….

China, then, has not yet fully absorbed the consequences of destroying its civil society—and India hasn’t yet fully reaped the rewards of letting its flourish. So when it comes to looking after the most vulnerable, appearances aside, India’s pell-mell democracy might yet outperform China’s hyper-rational autocracy.

Emphasizing the plurality of China’s population policies, sociologist Wang corrects the common impression that China ever had a single policy, even during the same time period.

China’s birth rate was halved during 1970-1979. That decline occurred before China’s “one-child policy” was implemented with the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s “An Open Letter to Members of the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese Communist Youth League on Controlling Population Growth” in, September 1980 (cited in Wang, endnote ii). The sharp fall-off in the 1970s was the basis for earlier criticism that China’s “one-child policy” was Malthusian overkill –largely unnecessary.

]]>3436David Cowhig: Liang Zhongtang on China’s Population and Fertilityhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2005/05/david-cowhig-liang-zhongtang-on-chinas-population-and-fertility/
Sun, 08 May 2005 17:43:15 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2005/05/08/david-cowhig-liang-zhongtang-on-chinas-population-and-fertility/
Thanks to China analyst David Cowhig for sending following article to CDT:

In “Research on the Overall Population and Female Fertility in the Chinese Mainland During the Late Twentieth Century” (article translated below) Liang Zhongtang of the Shanxi Province People’s Government Economic Research Center in the 5/2003 issue of Shengcanli Yanjiju [Productivity Research] pp. 147 -158 examines why Chinese data on population, fertility and other population characteristics are so unreliable. Liang Zhongtang is a demographer who has worked on family planning issues since 1979. This article is available on Chinese scholarly databases such as CNKI.

]]>3078China Fears a Baby Busthttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2004/12/china-fears-a-baby-bust/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2004/12/china-fears-a-baby-bust/#commentsMon, 06 Dec 2004 16:20:03 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2004/12/06/china-fears-a-baby-bust/ From the LA Times: “After 25 years of the one-child policy, the nation risks producing too few children. But many parents have decided one is enough. ”

This raises a new problem in China’s population structure. “In Shanghai, 2.6 million seniors make up about 16% of the city’s population, which far outstrips the worldwide average of 7%. Their swelling ranks are straining the city’s pension and social service systems. At the end of last year, there were only about 450 senior nursing facilities in Shanghai, with enough beds for just 37,000 people. Although a higher birthrate won’t solve this problem, more young people entering the labor force would generate taxes to help pay for health and social services. ”